Review: imici Messenger for Linux

Plugging the Phone Into the Wall

September 20, 2000

By
Brian Proffitt

Right off the bat, I must confess that this whole Instant
Messaging thing never really interested me. The amount of time I spend in front
of a computer all day has (a) dulled my social graces to the sharpness of a
baseball and (b) made me really, really loathe typing.

Thus, it was with some trepidation that I checked out imici
Messenger 0.1.1, the first commercial multi-protocol IM client for Linux.

For those of you who have not participated in instant
messaging before, the principles are really very simple. Each IM user is given
a unique identifier that the IM client quietly broadcasts over the Internet,
informing the world that the IM user is online and ready to chat.

When someone decides they want to converse with the first IM
user, they will see his or her name on the user list with a notation of some
sort that means "online." From there, it's conversation magic.

Like anything remotely useful in technology, IM has been
chopped up into different messaging protocols, each one a proprietary format
that allows users to communicate only within a closed system. Not that this is
a big setback. ICQ, at last count, had 77 million users, so it's not like you
would be hurting to find at least one person to talk to. Still, there are
limitations. If you have an AOL Instant
Messenger client, you are limited to chatting with AOL users. Ditto with MSN
and Yahoo. And all of these protocols save ICQ are simply out of reach for the
Linux community.

This is where products like imici Messenger come in. Dubbed
a universal IM client, imici Messenger allows users to connect to and
electronically chat with fellow users in up to five proprietary formats: AOL,
MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, and imici's own format.

Like many commercial ventures, imici has had this client
available on the Windows platform for quite some time.

The decision to move the product over to Linux presents no big
mystery. Trent McNair, the Chief Software Architect for imici, is himself a
professed Linux programmer and so is much of his team. Because of their
experience with Linux, McNair says, the team pushed management into going to
the Linux platform next.

Not that this was a big sell to make for the company CEO and
co-founder, Dante Federighi. Federighi sells the company's stance on
interoperable messaging very stongly. Not only does imici want to promote interoperability
across all messaging services, Federighi said, "we want to provide
interoperability across all platforms as well."

Getting ahold of Messenger is simple. The beta application
is available for free download at imici's offshoot Linux page at http://linux.imici.com.
You're asked to register some personal stats, but this process takes just a few
minutes.

The product is available for download as a binary RPM and
source RPM, as well as a tarball source file. The file sizes are small (around
1.5 Mb), so users with low-bandwidth connections won't have to wait long.

Installation of Messenger is a very easy process with the
binary RPM, and compiling the source was straightforward. This was done on Red Hat. I used Alien
to pop the RPM to DEB format, however, and had some segfaulting errors appear.
The one technical stipulation imici does place on installing the code is that your
machine needs to have Qt libraries of 2.0 or higher. So, if you're not running
KDE on your box, you may need to do some prepping first to get the Qt libraries.

The decision to use Qt 2.2 libraries was a no-brainer for
McNair's team, as many of them are proficient in C++ coding and Qt
"provides the best set of widgets out there," McNair said.